Sally Beauty May Be Latest Credit Card Hack Victim

The credit card payment system of yet another national retail chain appears to have been violated. This time it’s Sally Beauty, which looks to be the common denominator among a group of recently stolen credit card numbers.

Cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs — who is becoming a household name because of all the recent hacks — reports that when a bundle of 282,000 stolen credit card numbers recently went on sale on an underground market, a trio of banks each purchased a handful of their customers cards in an attempt to trace back the source of the theft.

The banks then figured that the underlying connection between all the cards was that they had each been used at a Sally Beauty store within the 10 days previous.

The chain operates approximately 2,600 stores in the U.S. alone.

A rep for Sally Beauty tells Krebs that its system had detected a network intrusion in late February, but neither Sally’s IT folks nor an outside forensics firm could find evidence that customer card data had been stolen.

But Krebs reports that all of the banks he spoke to had fraud reports on cards shortly after they were used at Sally Beauty in late February/early March.

So if you recently used your credit or debit card at a Sally Beauty store, you should keep an eye on your account activity to make sure you catch any fraudulent activity right away.